C2020 in The New Yorker

In this week's New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin draws on The Constitution in 2020 to illuminate President Obama's (unique? idiosyncratic? pragmatic?) approach to the courts and the judicial appointment process. Toobin raises important questions about the role judges have played and should play in reform movements, all while suggesting - echoing several contributors to The Constitution in 2020 - that the new frontier for change may not be the courts, but popular politics.

Obama's Inauguration: A Progressive Approach to Religion in the Public Sphere?

 

"We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers."
 – Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, January 2009

Since George Washington invoked “the Almighty Being” in his first inaugural address, prayer has opened America's Presidential inaugural ceremonies.  Recent Presidents -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- have chosen religious figures who have offered broad ecumenical prayers to appeal to the widest range of people.

But, in a departure from the norm, Barack Obama chose voices from extreme ends of the political spectrum and wove them together into a pluralistic patchwork of public religious expression: the first openly gay Episcopalian bishop commenced the festivities, an evangelical preacher known for his opposition to gay marriage offered the invocation, and a veteran civil rights leader delivered the benediction.  At the National Prayer Service the next day, the first female president of the Disciples of Christ gave the sermon, and Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic leaders offered prayers from their faith traditions. (To see video coverage of the festitivites, click here.)

Never before had an inaugural ceremony embraced such radically inclusive religious representation.  Obama was the first to give a prominent place to Muslims and Hindus, both in the ceremony and his inauguration speech.  (The Bush and Clinton inaugurations were racially diverse but remained almost exclusively Judeo-Christian, prominently featuring Billy Graham.)  Can Obama’s inauguration hold up a picture of a new progressive approach to religion in the public sphere?